Dr, Blay Whitby

Despite the introduction of improved safety mechanisms, robots
have claimed many more victims since 1981. Over the years people have
been crushed, hit on the head, welded and even had molten aluminium
poured over them by robots. Last year there were 77 robot-related
accidents in Britain alone, according to the Health and Safety
Executive…

So what exactly is being done to protect us from these mechanical
menaces? “Not enough”, says Blay Whitby, an artificial-intelligence
expert at the University of Sussex in England. This is hardly surprising
given that the field of “safety-critical computing” is barely a decade
old, he says.

So where does this leave Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics? They were a
narrative device, and were never actually meant to work in the real
world, says Dr. Whitby. Quite apart from the fact that the laws require
the robot to have some form of human-like intelligence, which robots
still lack, the laws themselves don’t actually work very well. Indeed,
Asimov repeatedly knocked them down in his robot stories, showing time
and again how these seemingly watertight rules could produce unintended
consequences.